


Out of the Darkness

by clockworkrobots



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Coda, M/M, Season/Series 10, Self-Hatred
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-23
Updated: 2014-10-23
Packaged: 2018-02-22 06:28:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2497940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clockworkrobots/pseuds/clockworkrobots
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cas steps out the door of Dean's room. This is what happens after. 10.03 coda fic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Out of the Darkness

_I was afraid someday you’d return,_   
_And changed at my door as you’d once been before,_   
_The flutter of fortune, the bringer of gloom,_   
_Out of the darkness, and into my room._

— Out of the Darkness, Matthew & The Atlas

  
  
***

  
"… Heaven and Hell seem reasonably back in order," Castiel muses encouragingly before stepping out the door of Dean’s room. "It’s quiet out there." 

Dean watches him leave with a familiar ache in his gut, the most familiar thing he has felt since waking up from the walking nightmare that’s been his life for the past few months. He guess both too much and too little have changed, after all.  _At least he came to say good bye_ , Dean muses ruefully. But still, he feels unsettled, restless, and it may just be the lingering effects of the last few days or hell, few  _years_ , but before he knows it, Dean’s bolting out the door after him.

"Cas, wait—" he calls out, stumbling into the hallway. Cas turns around to blink at him in surprise. "Just—" Dean grapples with his words, unsure of what to actually _say_  now that he’s dived into the deep end. Cas waits patiently, confused but curious expression on his face.

Dean takes a deep breath, and starts again. ”You could, uh, use a break too, you know,” he says, feeling like that was completely and utterly underwhelming. Well, he never did claim to be a wordsmith.

Cas’ expression shifts to one of surprise, but then falls. “I have—”

A sinking feeling swells in Dean’s stomach. Of course. “Yeah, a chick waiting for you,” Dean finishes. But he’s not so easily defeated. “She can come inside, too,” he offers.

This seems to placate Cas, but then he winces, as if remembering something important. “That might be… awkward,” he admits.

Dean’s eyes narrow, now suspicious. “Who exactly do you have out there?”

Castiel shifts awkwardly. He never was a good liar, where Dean was concerned. Not when it was obvious he hated keeping the secret, at least. Dean almost wants to smile.  

"Hannah," Cas finally admits after a beat.

"Hannah, the angel who tried to get you to _kill me_  Hannah?” Dean starts, not expecting that answer.  _Clearly_  he has a lot to catch up on.

Cas at least as the good grace to look a little guilty for keeping this detail from him. “In fairness, she was only doing what she thought was right,” he adds, “A familiar feeling, for both of us, I think.”

Well. Dean can’t argue with that. “Yeah.”

Castiel turns to look behind him, down the long stretch of hallway, as if to see if Hannah is not already standing behind him, before fore turning back to look at Dean. “I’ll ask if she doesn’t mind waiting for a little while longer. Though she doesn’t exactly…” he trails off.

"What?"

Castiel grimaces. “She has difficulty understanding my…  _attachment_  to humanity,” he eventually says after a moment, gaze shifted to the ground. But then he locks eyes with Dean. “To _you_.”

Dean feels his cheeks burn hot. “And what—” he gulps, unsure and excited and afraid. “—And what is that about, exactly?”

Castiel frowns. “I don’t understand.”

"Your…" Dean coughs distractedly," _'attachment'_  to me. Is that—” he tries to ask  a little helpless, fumbling for the right words. “What does that mean?” 

He knows what he  _hopes_  it means, what he dare not give voice to, not after too many times shattered. But his mind is a cloud of doubt. Hope is a powerful thing, but so is bitterness, so is fear. Dean is all too accustomed to the latter.

"I’d think it obvious," Cas says, utterly unhelpful. It’s almost endearing.

Dean sighs. “Explain it to me like I’m 5. Or, y’know,” he chuckles nervously, “2 hours old, I guess.”

Castiel looks down, and then back up at Dean again. “Dean, I—” he begins to say, face open and _yearning_  almost, about to—

"Wait here," he says suddenly.

"I—okay..?"

His friend sets his jaw and shoulders determinedly. “I’ll be back.”

  
***

  
Dean's lingering out in the war room next to the library, having followed Cas out that far, when Cas comes back inside. "Hannah is..." he says, face drawn and tired as he steps slowly down the metal stairs. "Not happy with me. Again. But she has conceded that I could use some rest."

"That's more like it," Dean smiles. It's then that he notices the figure trailing just behind Cas, one he truly didn't think he'd ever see again. But that's the thing about angels, he guess, they always fucking show up when you least expect it. And when you least want them to. "Uh, hey," he greets her with a small wave. How do you say hello to someone who last time they saw you wanted to kill you? It's also fairly sad that this is an awkward situation Dean has been in more than once before.

"Winchester," Hannah nods at him stiffly, as she makes her own way down the stairs to stand next to Cas. She glances at him in obvious disproval.

Dean clears is throat. "Well, make yourself at home," he says, sweeping his arm out behind him.

Hannah tilts her head at him in confusion. A little jolt zips through Dean's chest at the familial resemblance. He feels a little lightheaded, all of a sudden, as if teetering on the edge of something.

"My home is in Heaven," she says, sounding vaguely offended.

"Hannah, it's--" Castiel interjects. "It's an expression of hospitality."

"Oh," Hannah blinks, though she doesn't seem any happier. Still, she offers Dean a stiff smile. "Thank you."

"Right," Dean begins to say, but then is overcome with a sensation that is half a wave of nausea and half the feeling of his head imploding. In the second before he passes out, he feels a little grateful that at least this means the roiling feeling in his stomach wasn't all petty jealousy. Not completely. Then he whites out.

  
***

Dean blinks awake slowly. His head still feels dizzy, uncomfortably light, and his gut contracts in pain before grumbling in hunger. Opening his eyes, he sees he’s back in his room, having been carried to his bed. Castiel sits next to him, having pulled out the chair from Dean’s desk.

"What happened?" he croaks, still trying to get his bearings. The lamp on the desk glares a little too bright.

"You collapsed," Castiel explains, face serious and ashen. He looks like he’s seen a ghost.  _Heh, well,_  Dean muses,  _he kinda has_.

"I  _fainted?_ " he asks, embarrassed as he tries to sit up. Cas moves to help him, warm hand against Dean’s back. Dean tries not to focus on it, nor mourn it too pathetically when it pulls away.

"Yes," Cas says. "It might be residual shock from the ordeal you went through," he stands up half way to reach across to Dean’s desk top to fetch a bowl of something, "or the fact that you haven’t eaten in about 72 hours. Sam did go out to get you food but," he hands the bowl out to Dean, spoon inside it facing towards him. "Here."

Dean takes it, smiling in bewilderment but also eternal gratitude. His stomach grumbles again in earnest. “Cereal?”

Cas shifts in his chair. "It was all I could find…" 

Dean laughs. “You realised you just brought me breakfast in bed,” he points out, as he picks the spoon up. 

"I suppose so," Cas agrees, small smile peaking in at the corner of his lips. Ah, there it is.

Dean shovels in a giant mouthful of what both looks and definitely tastes like stale Shreddies. Right now though, he hardly cares. It’s the fucking most delicious thing he’s ever eaten, as far as he’s concerned. He’s barely swallowed before he’s gorging down another giant spoonful, and all the while Cas just sits, and watches him.

"Not that I don’t love that you’re still here, man, but," Dean tries to say around a mouthful of food. He gulps it down before he finishes, "it’s kinda creepy you just sitting there watching me eat."

Cas blinks, and then his face shuts off. “Oh, yes, I’m sorry, I’ll—”

Shit.

"No!" Dean barks before Cas can stand up. He  _was_  only half-joking, but if Dean’s honest he’s always found Cas’ creepy staring thing ridiculously cute. Creepy, but cute. “I mean, you don’t have to  _leave_ , I—”

Cas flushes in embarrassment. “Of course,” he says, rolling his shoulders and sitting back in his seat, hands curled over his knees. Dean settles back against his headboard, too, as he continues to eat.

"Tell me something, anything," he prompts before taking another bite. "What have you been up to? Last time I saw you was…" he huffs in wry amusement, "well, when Hannah tried to get you to kill me."

"Well," Cas sighs, "Gadreel and I attempted to infiltrate Heaven, but were caught by Metatron."

"Oh, shit." Dean supposes that’s hardly _surprising_ , but still. Shitty. At elast Cas is here to tell the tale.

"Luckily Hannah and the rest of the angels helped us accost him in the end, but not before Gadreel sacrificed himself," Cas continues, pausing briefly as he utters the name of his lost brother. Dean may have harboured no good will for the guy, but he thinks he gets it, Cas’ sense of loss every time one of his siblings die, even if he barely knew them. He feels like it was his fault, and man, does Dean get _that_. Man, they are two sorry sons of bitches what it comes to burdens and guilt.

"So this was, what, after that Metadouche ganked me?" Dean asks, slurping at the last vestiges of milk in the bowl before setting it down on the bed in the empty space beside him.

He knows it’s weird that he can talk about his own death so flippantly, but the last few months… Dean’s memory of his demonhood at the moment is still a bit hazy, like a dream he had and didn’t understand. It’s not like it was when he came back from Hell, when the memories were fresh and raw and  _screaming_  to rip his mind and body apart. This time, it’s like there is a buffer in his head, a flimsy one, maybe, that he can already feel bulging out, bucking beneath the strain, the  _pull_  of the Mark, but it’s there, with the memories of death and everything after still a dark blur.

Cas sucks in a breath. “Yes,” he says, voice strained as he looks down at his hands, now clasped together, twisting in his lap. Such a  _human_  mannerism, Dean thinks distractedly. When he raises his gaze again, he looks pained, mouth drawn, eyes wide. “I’m sorry, Dean,” he says, and in the back of his mind Dean hears the whisper:  _for everything_.

But Dean, as much as he wants to console his friend, doesn’t quite follow. “For what?”

At this, Cas almost seems to crumble more. “That I wasn’t  _there_ , that I couldn’t—” he grunts in frustration. “Metatron, when he found me he—He taunted me with your death,” he says, voice low, rough and weary. 

"Putting the douche in Metadouche," Dean jokes automatically, but his own lungs feel hollow, too, and yet—at the same time, too small for all the air he feels like he needs to breathe again.

"Yeah," Cas tries to laugh with him, but it comes out anxious and frayed. His weak smile quickly falters. "I’m sorry I couldn’t help you, Dean. I should have been there."

Dean looks at his friend’s hands, coiled in on each other. He feels like he knows these hands, both as weapons and as forces of healing, but also not  _enough_. He watches them grip each other nervously and wishes instead they could find solace against his skin, as their bodies hold each other. But he shakes his head. It’s a silly, fruitless thought.

Instead, he says, “But you did, man. You’re here _now_. And I wouldn’t’ve come out from—” he takes a deep breath, “—from  _any_  of it if it weren’t for you.” He says these words with a fierceness of conviction he didn’t know he possessed before he said them. 

Castiel swallows thickly, and Dean watches the mesmerising bod of his throat. “Nonetheless, I wish I could have been there for you sooner.”

Dean sighs. “Our lives…” he laughs mirthlessly. “We never can catch a break, can we?”

At that, Cas  _does_  smile for real. It’s small, but it’s  _there_. A warmth flows through Dean’s chest. “I thought we were having one right now,” he deadpans, and Dean can’t help but chuckle.

"You know what I mean."

Cas nods. “I do.”

"I get it, Cas, you know, I do. Heaven, your girl out there—"

Cas starts. “She’s not—“he begins to correct him, but Dean ploughs on.

"I get that it comes first for you," Dean says, and thought the words pain him to say, he has long accepted them. He feels pathetic a bit, for wishing it was otherwise, when he has Sam, and how much  _everything_  has been about Sam since the day the dream of the childhood he never knew went up in flames, but Dean never claimed to not be greedy, to not  _want._  And  _God,_  does he want things, like Cas’ eyes upon him always, his voice, his  _hands_ —

"That’s not—" Castiel begins to say, breaking Dean out of his self-destructive thoughts, but then catches himself. "That _has_  been true, in the past,” he concedes. “But it isn’t anymore. Not for a long time.”

Dean frowns. His nerves feel raw and his skin too vulnerable, too bear, and his head buzzes with impossibilities. “What’re you saying?”

Castiel’s eyes are blue, Dean thinks. So stupidly blue that it’s  _unfair_  because they’re so full of something nameless that Dean can never seem to look away. “That it’s  _you,_  Dean. If I had to choose. Like I did when Hannah forced my hand,” he says, voice oddly calm, assured, like it’s truth unchanged for millennia. Maybe it is. “I would choose you.”

Dean doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “But you won’t—” he chokes out like an idiot who ruins things, ‘cause he mouth likes to say things before he’s thought them through. She shakes his head, hiding his face. “Never mind.”

"What?"

When Dean musters the courage to look up again, Cas’ face has none of the judgement he’d sworn would be there. This gives him the courage to say his worst secret, his worst weakness when it comes this impossible man who will still always be something terrifyingly  _other_ : “You still won’t stay.”

Castiel moves to stand up, and for a frightening second, Dean thinks he was just wrong about everything, that Cas is gonna stalk out for good, but instead, he moves to sit on the edge of Dean’s bed. So close, and still so far.

"We both have long roads to walk Dean," he says, "you know this. We did not ask for it, no, but it is what we must do. Hannah, Heaven, they need my help right now, and I owe them that. The things I’ve done…" he heaves a heavy sigh, "I owe many people many things, and not everything can be repaired at once."

Cas watches he way the mattress bends beneath him with a quiet fascination. “But you’re not the path I must walk, Dean,” he speaks after a moment, face so close to Dean’s own, so easy to reach out and _touch._  Dean doesn’t dare though, too shocked still by the unspoken words about to change everything forever. “Rather… The destination I hope to come home to.”

Dean doesn’t know his own voice as he pleads, “ _Cas_ …” though for what, he does not know.

"I owe you and your brother as well," Cas adds. "My friendship, my gratitude, my trust," he grimaces again in his guilt for past trespasses against them, ones that Dean has long forgiven him for but of course can’t forget. "But what I want to give you doesn’t derive from _debt._ ”

Dean feels winded, breathless. “What do you want to give me?”

Castiel’s eyes lock with his. “Myself.” 

Something breaks.

"Cas, I—" Dean begins to say, though he has no idea what he would have said before Cas interrupts him.

"I’m dying, Dean," he states sombrely. "I don’t know when, or where, but it will happen,"

Like zero to sixty, Dean’s gone from frantic longing to a determined, familiar anger at how fucking _unfair_  their life is. “We’ll fix it, Cas, right? Like we always do, we’ll find a way to—”

"No, Dean," Cas cuts him off before he can say anything more. "There is no _‘fixing it’_  this time.”

“ _Fuck_  that,” Dean bites out, hands bunched into fists in his sheets at his side, “Doesn’t what just happened prove that that’s all bullshit? We’re  _made_  for the impossible.”

"This, I’m afraid—"

"No," Dean asserts, face hard. "No, I’m not losing you again, not—"

"Dean," Castiel implores, but Dean cannot bear it.

"You can’t ask me to just sit by and watch you die, man," he pleads, with less bravery than he’d shown a second previously. He has courage, he knows, he’s faced many things. But he doesn’t know if he could face _that_.

But again, Cas surprises him. “That’s not what I’m asking.”

"Then what?"

"I’m dying, but as an angel," he specifies. "There is a _‘way out’_ , so to speak, but it’s not fixing my dying grace. It is… well, racing it to the finish, I guess.” 

"Yeah, I’m not following."

"When the time comes," Castiel explains, face resolved and determined, "I am going to cut it out myself."

Dean’s eyes widen in shock. “But you’ll die—” he starts to say, but is surprised silent by Castiel’s hand on his forearm, grounding him before he flies apart and away.

"I’ll  _fall_.”

The weight of this revelation crashes down upon Dean with loud ringing in his ear.  _Fall._  It’s a loaded word, with more meaning for them than for most. “You’ll become human?” he asks, voice rough and small, hardly believing it at all.

"Again and for the last time, yes," Cas nods. "I can’t do it yet, there is too much to do, but… It is coming."

"I’m sorry," Dean offers, because he feels he should. Secretly, guiltily, this is what he’s wanted for awhile, Cas  _human_ , Cas _here_ , Cas  _his_ , but he knew it was never something possible to ask for. Not while Cas was still trying to figure out himself, not when they were still trying to figure out each other. And then, well, the sky fell and Dean died and no time ever seemed like the right time to bring up the fact that Dean’s quiet, unspoken dream was for them to grow old together. Foolish, anyway, to think Dean would ever have a chance to grow old.

Cas shakes his head. “I’m not,” he says, and then smiles, almsot surprised at himself that he said it, but now vocalised, it feels perfectly  _right_. “I’m grieved, in a way, of course, but this is not—this is not a regret.”

Cas still hasn’t moved his hand. It burns into Dean’s arm in a way the Mark of Cain never did. 

"And what are you gonna do?" Dean swallows hard, trying to ignore the way the heat of it coils up his arm. "After, I mean."

"Well, as I said," Cas near-whispers, and releases his grip on Dean’s forearm to slide his hand down, to fall on top of Dean’s on the bed. "I hope to come home."

Dean blinks down at the. “To me,” he repeats as his brain tries to catch up, dulled by the elated itch whizzing it’s way down his fingers and his legs.

"To you," Cas says again, as if he will never tired of saying it. And  _God,_  if that’s not the damnedest thing.

"And then you’ll stay?" he asks shakily, nervously ecstatic.

Cas smiles, and not that warm but reserved smile that comes easy to him nowadays, but a  _smile,_  with teeth and all. Jesus, it’s bright.

"Yes."

Dean coughs out a laugh, throat too choked up to breathe right.”Fuck,  _Cas_ —” he starts, but then realises with another jolting sensation that he maybe doesn’t even need to use words anymore to show his thanks. So he doesn’t.

He kisses him.

There’s a muffled  _hrumpf_  of surprise from Cas when Dean’s lips meet his, but Cas quickly eases into him, gently at first, but then followed by an almost desperate enthusiasm when Dean does not pull away.

Eyes closed, Dean can feel Cas’ other hand raise to his cheek, as his right stays where it is, cradling Dean’s against the bed sheet. He can feel his stubble, the strange but  _good_  scratch of it, and holy hell can he feel he way Cas’ mouth opens up to him, the way the wetness of it pours into his body and douses any doubts while the rest of him is lit on _fire_.

Cas kisses without practice or technique but also without _shame_ , and Dean literally eats it up. His own free had has made its way to Cas’ neck, pulling him by the back of his head, closer and closer until Dean thinks he positively might drown in this, and it is a _glorious_  feeling.

They pull away with a hitched breath, faces red and rubbed. Cas looks debauched, a bit, Dean thinks, though not quite as debauched as Dean would soon like to see him look. 

He knows this is a sort of goodbye, too, that Cas still has promises to keep, but it’s a far better one. It’s one that ends on more of a promise. They both have miles to go, you know, but it’s nice to know that when they finally do get to sleep, they might just, miraculously, get to fall in bed together.

 

 


End file.
